And In The Darkness
by permetaform
Summary: Sands adjusts. contains mm


And In The Darkness  
by Kanzeyori

**Summary:**Sands adjusts.  
**Disclaimer:** Not mine, no money earned.  
**Pairing:** Sands/El  
**Rating:** R

**Warning:** LotR quote taken into and out of context

**Acknowledgements:** This fic would not have been written without encouragement from **teabeard**, **fajrdrako**, and **lilneko** and especially the lovely feedback and critique from my wonderful WONDERFUL betas **calichan**, **hippediva**, **majokai**. and **slashygood** who puts up with my bad grammar and hyperness and caffinated hyperventilation and author insecurities and yea. ::HUGS::

* * *

**Notes:** 'collateral damage' is a miltary term meaning unintentional damage to civil property and civilian casualties. And: points if you catch the PotC reference.

* * *

He carries a red-tipped cane that sings on the headquarter's glossed wood with each strike (_blood money paid for a floor so fine, o Barrillo cousin, how many pounds of flesh did you trade? _), one two _click click_ a gun cocking that no one sees.  
  
Fuckers are blinder than he is.  
  
Sands measures the width of the empty corridor with the choir of echoes and orients himself to the shouting. Two more steps closer to the sound, and the feel in his lower legs tells him that he nears a wall. The quality of the shouting tells him that the wall isn't thick.  
  
That voice. There.  
  
He presses his gun to the wall, pulls the trigger, and the shouting stops with a meaty thump. Sands listens intently as he shifts the gun, stinging warm, to the small of his back and walks away, but the voice isn't raised again.  
  
_Click click click. _The echos change at an intersection. The first, left; the next right. The shouting nears and Sands half turns. He slips a stilletto handle into his palm, hidden by the cane, and waits, head tilted. Footsteps and a breeze.  
  
Stupid fucks ran right past him.  
  
Sands holds back the laughter, nearly loses it as he hears sporadic bouts of gunfire elsewhere (_I know those guns_), toward what's supposed to be the courtyard, and greets another wall with a tap of his cane. No, _door_, he corrects, feeling the cool surface and windowpane edging with his fingertips.  
  
The solidity abruptly leaves, his fingers quickly flailing in dark space. But soon clasped; and he recognizes this hand and this smell of gunpowder and sun.  
  
"My grammatical friend! Fancy meeting you here!"  
  
A mutual squeeze of recognition.  
  
"Offer a blind man your arm?" The Mariachi's outfit jingles as he obligingly brings one forth, which Sands seeks then loops with his, and he hears El's smile when the musician asks for tales of his day.  
  
He lets himself be quickly led to a car. He is blind, after all, and this is his guide, no show here, move on move on, there is a commotion? I'm sorry sir I haven't _seen_ anything, you see?  
  
_easy laughter_, and they slip away.  
_  
rewind_

"You understand? About this long, this thin, and red-tipped. And for fuck's sake don't _tell_ anyone about it." Their fourth hit, and the cartels are getting nervous. The front entrance is too guarded, too masked in respectability, and too public, and Sands thinks its high time the _cartels_ are getting fucked up the back way.  
  
_Justice_, Sands thinks, and laughs.  
_  
rewindrewindrewind_

For a brief moment, face down in the grit of the streets of a revolting country, blood running like tears, Sands almost conceeds the game. Much as it was with Ajedrez, his and Mexico's relationship was one built from hate and disgust.  
  
A cleansing revolution will suit them both.  
  
Gouge out my eyes?  
  
_Feeling's mutual, fuckmook. _And Sands drags himself up, balancing on the kid's shoulder, to make his way to the city square.  
  
Sands had spent most of his time south of the border giving Mexico the finger.  
  
Sees no reason to stop now.  
_  
rewind_

He flipped open the wrinkled copy of _Superman #2_, idly chewing spearmint, as his friends shuffle in the spoiled riches of his room and make no complaint of _"A Streetcar Named Desire"_ playing in the background. (_good boys, have a biscuit._) Sheldon tosses them a pack of cigarettes.  
  
Lies back on the beanbag like a lord and pretends to skim the comic.  
  
There is an uncomfortable pause as they move around uneasily and mindlessly, and it makes Sheldon grin inside. But he looks up at the near inaudible sizzling sound. A singe was starting on a shirt.  
  
"Fuckers! Don't get ash on the floor!" His clothes were there. He skids the teacup he'd been using as an ashtray toward them with a foot and gestures toward it crossly.  
  
The gardeners soon arrive. And the fuckwits are talking about water balloons.  
  
"How immature are _water_ balloons?" but he grinned, long and slow, "freeze them awhile first."  
  
He sticks his gum to a brightly colored corner, dogears the page, and gets up to lead the way.  
_  
pause_

The reassignment letter fills him with panicpride. **Mexico**, it said.  
  
He knows what that means. He knows Lady Mexico and her defiant challenge, caked with yellow mud and hints of black oil and fucked both ways, American businessmen cuntwise and homegrown cartels up its back door. (_Sleep lightly in Mexico, Agent Sands._)  
  
He looks around the loft while hauling out his bags and  
  
_clothes and comics littered like candy paper, first editions smeared with peach schnapps, a record player propped level with a porn mag, collectible posters lining dusty crevices and corners, and records, all originals, scattered 'round, stacked haphazardly in columns and columns and_  
  
...and it won't fit.  
  
_and commendations, given grudgingly. Earned, but awarded only because of daddy's name stuck to the assend of his, despite a long trail of 'collateral damage'; names that follow him like widows and orphans and revenge like toothy, triumphant grins.  
  
Sleep lightly in Mexico, Agent Sands. _  
  
Not like he slept deeply here, either.  
_  
fastforward_

Everything's stilted now, empty with a _crack_-snapped damage and a hanging-loose broken-bone walk, a city full of bodies in the streets silent with everything except flies no voices shout and nothing but the flap of an occasional paper here. and there.  
  
No other sound to find himself by, with the boy sent away.  
  
The streets are still, hot, and stifling. His blood rises instead of sweat.  
  
His legs, in the silence, eventually fold beneath him. He could not tell when; the church bells have stopped. He's--  
_  
pause_  
_  
--feverish and freaking slow, reaching out and failing, heatsoaked and falling in black tar poured hot into his eyes and burning, surrounded in endless space, and reaching up, around wildly, and back into_  
  
something warm. Solid. Someone stills his hands; and eyeholes, gone numb with pain, couldn't see who it was.  
  
But he hears the heaven's clarity of the boy's voice. And recognizes the grounded tonal fabric of the Mariachi's, and is reminded of when he himself struck deals before and braces himself for the betrayal.  
  
"Here to skullfuck me out of my misery?" Sands wrestles himself weakly away and reaches to push against the wall to stand;  
  
is surprised by the hand that helps him up instead.  
_  
pause_

They later tell him that it took a week before he was coherent again, days filtered of sweat and strummed tunes and tequila and pain.  
  
He remembers feeling strung tight, like a guitar string, hung on the presence of two voices and a melody.  
_pause_  
"Mexico has claimed you." His wounds tingle; he thinks El is staring at them.  
  
"_Sí señor_," Sands spat out, "You have a _bitch_ of a motherland, Son of Mexico, you know that?" he was rubbing at the bandages around his eyes again. El plucks his hands away irritably.  
  
"Do not insult her." But this was said mildly and Sands notes that he mentions nothing of the insult to himself.  
  
"Simply the godshitting truth. What else would you call this?" Sands jerks his chin up, letting the sunlight hit him full on the face where his bandages lie. He wonders what he looks like, scarred, bound, and blinded, wrapped half in sheets and half in sunlight, and barks out a laugh when the Mariachi finally says,  
  
"Justice."  
_  
pause_

"Ow. Dammit."  
  
The Mariachi turned, chains clicking. Sands was sitting and rubbing at the place where his eyes used to be.  
  
El puffed out a breath, reached over, and grabbed his hands.  
  
"Stop that."  
  
"But _mother_," Sands whined, "I have a _booboo_."  
  
"What?" El mocked, "Kiss it better?" Sands stilled.  
  
And perhaps that's why he did. Leaned over and brushed two, one on each side and quickly, on the bruised edges where it was least damaged.  
  
Pressed a third to his brow.  
  
And paused.  
  
The Mariachi's hands, when he leaned back, had gone surprised and loose; but Sands' had tightened his grip in turn.  
_  
fastforward...play_  
_  
"Buenos días," _  
  
and the blankets were yanked away. Sands groaned into the morning coolness and snuffled into their pillow,  
  
"Well aren't _you_ just a shining mole on dawn's buttcrack." But got up anyways.  
  
Sands dressed and stumbled into the kitchen, counting steps and one hand slightly out to place the doorframes. He follows his nose to the table, barely catching himself from stumbling into a chair, and sits.  
  
The boy, voice cracking, relates the morning gossip; he does not mention the money-filled suitcase sitting like an elephant in their living room, tagged with endless forwarding addresses that eventually backtrack to the capital. The cartels have regrouped after the chaos of Barillo's power vacuum; their atrocities travel and it's these that the boy tells. He could _hear_ the Mariachi frown.  
  
"Mexico's hero should help again," the boy suggests. They both wait for the Mariachi's response.  
  
El guides Sands' fingers to the handle of the coffee pot instead.  
  
And it's Sands' turn to frown. He hears El shift around and the scrape of the chair as the musician gets up, hears him move randomly and start tuning his guitar.  
  
Sands remembers once catching El slowly plucking out "_Over the Rainbow._" He'd approached and stopped the strings.  
  
"Stick to things you know, mariachi," he'd said, then.  
  
He found he'd gotten used to the melodies. Sands mentions, now,  
  
"I'd be able to pry your fingers away from guns the way I'd pry them from a guitar," _half-serious_, "by cutting them off." He goes back to eating.  
  
And smiles when he later hears the Mariachi clicking open the _other_ guitar case. He refuses to be surprised when something solid hits his chest; automatically catching the object as it slides down and raising both eyebrows when his hands recognizes the grip of a gun.  
  
"Your hands remember too, yes?"  
  
"I have to _work_ to be your fucktoy now, is that it?" Sands is already taking apart and re-oiling the weapon by feel.  
  
"Yes," the Mariachi huffs in laughter.  
  
Sands leers.  
_  
fastforwardfastforward_

He trickles tequila and paints the Mariachi's chest with his fingertips. Brings his lips to where his fingers meet alcohol and sweat and skin. Breathes to evaporate the liquid, and in this godforsaken heat bring up goosebumps for him to trace, like braille.  
  
He reads El with his fingertips, senses him seconds before they touch with the heat of him, and hears the world around them crunch forward as it should, balanced. Sheldon Jeffrey Sands is _blind_, not deaf.  
  
Thank god.  
  
thank god thank god  
  
Strains of _"If I Only Had a Brain" _and _"It Really Was No Miracle"_ drift in from downstairs, coming from the old player that he'd demanded the Mariachi fetch. It's always on, partly old musicals, partly traditional guitar refrains, a map of sound to orient by.  
  
Sometimes Sands turns over at night, (_he can tell, it is chill, the dust settles and the air smells of starlight_) to breathe the music in. It is something.  
  
He reaches up sometimes, jolting awake and believing that this time, _this time_, he'll open his eyes to a lazy noonday and see El (_strumming a guitar_) in dustmotes and the kid (_grown now, really_) running somewhere below with dirt wreathed up and down his legs.  
  
He reaches up sometimes, phantom itches where _nothing_ is, stray sparks of light that nothing sees and the lingering last image of a psychopath and his shinysharpness.  
  
He reaches up sometimes, he says just to rub, but instead scratches, pries a bit, spans the empty space and prods the borders, but El will stop him from pressing too hard and raising blood.  
He reaches up sometimes; but only when the Mariachi is there to catch his hands.

* * *

"And in the darkness...bind them." 


End file.
